Today is what I want to talk about in this post and that’s because today something a bit weird occured. See, I woke up pretty early, putzed on the computer for a bit, started feeling sort of cooped up and cagey and decided to go to the city center to walk around and get a coffee. So I set off on my bike, went to the bookstore, browsed the English book section and found absolutely nothing that I wanted to read.  You have no idea how rare it is for me not to see at least one book title that catches my eye, but today there was nothing.
And for as much as I know I should:

1. Go to the library instead of an overpriced book store
2. Start reading Dutch books instead of English books

I still prefer to look at the nice, shiny fresh books in the English section of FNAC.

But not finding anything interesting put me in sort of a foul mood and I began to ruminate as I meandered down the Veldstraat towards The Foodmaker. Here it was, Monday, and I was wandering around jobless in the same boring old city (when you live in a city with a real castle for over a year the awe tends to ebb away…I mean Disney is plastic but they have daily fireworks) with nothing to do except clean the house and finish up the laundry when I got home (still haven’t gotten to that yet). So I went to The Foodmaker, ordered my coffee and sat down at a table, brooding in silence, trying not to let my mood become too toxic. There was one of those table toppers advertising Evian so I pulled it closer to me and began absent mindedly reading about the natural richness of bicarbonates in the soda water until halfway through the add I suddenly got stuck and couldn’t read any farther.

That was odd. It’s been a  long time since I struggled to read something as simple as an advertisement in Dutch. I blinked a few times and tried starting over from the beginning when I realized that I’d been reading the French part of the add. I haven’t taken a French class since I was about 20 years old and I only passed because the prof was an old perv who liked to look down my shirt.

So I guess Garfield was right all along; you really can learn through osmosis!

It could have gone worse in as much as I left less than half of it blank.

Yeah, it was that bad, despite the fact that I was allowed to take it in English. Part of the problem was in the fact that I thought it was open book until last night when I found out that it wasn’t and that there was no way that I could learn what I had skimmed over in the 900+ pages of reading material. Another part of the problem is that when it comes to studying, I’m just lazy.  And that’s hard for me to say because I never thought I was lazy before when it came to learning, but I’ve realized that I am and always was because I never had to study.

My whole life (with the exception of math), as long as I showed up to class and paid attention, I rarely, if ever had to study.  For some reason I thought that would work here too except I missed the obvious fact that the classes were taught in fucking Dutch. I really have no clue why I expected that I’d retain anything that I could only half understand or pay attention to due to language difficulties.

And then there was the fact that all the articles I had to read were densely data-based.  In other words, these weren’t articles based on observations and anecdotes.  They were scientific articles explaning in high detail, methods of data collection.
Shit like that is why I decided to get out of psychology before I even got my bachelors in it.
I have no interest in how the test-makers make the tests or how the data is collected.  My area of interest is in observation, analysis of an individual and the resulting course of action. That’s why I wanted to go into prison counseling when I initially began working for a degree in psychology.  Then once I realized the severity of institutionalization and that my success rate in counseling prisoners was bound to send me to counseling myself, I began aimlessly poking around for other stuff to do.  The problem being that I was 3 years into my degree.  Too far to turn back but not far enough to hurry the fuck up and graduate.

Yeah, so I’m lazy and I’m currently being pretty much forced into picking back up on an education that I decided a long time ago that I don’t want and am not interested in.
That makes focussing on it pretty hard.  Alongside the whole immigration thing I guess I’m not very surprised that I dropped the ball on this one. I could sit around and let it make me feel stupid, or like a failure.  That’s the easy thing to do, I suppose.
But I know I’m not stupid.
I am lazy and I have a hard time focusing or concentrating my attention on any one thing for too long (the beauty of working in childcare is that kids can’t do this either so I fit right in). As soon as anything math or equation related is discussed my eyes glaze over and I start thinking about why I haven’t thought up any good story ideas lately or why I can’t find any crackers even remotely like Triscuits in Belgium.

I guess, what it boils down to is this.  I don’t want to be the one that makes the tests.  I don’t want to be the one that has to explain how they work. I want to be the one that evaluates the condition of the person based on the test scores and the one who develops solutions for the person that needs help.

I have a good memory, attention to detail and I know people.  I’m empathetic and I have an inate understanding of why people tick. Bascially all of the intelligences that I have aptitude in are the ones that can’t help me in my current situation.  I also have a hard time forcing myself to do things that I don’t want to do, but when you’re in a foreign country where you don’t speak the native language and your strengths are 90% language based, donig what you don’t want to do becomes somewhat the staus quo.

So I guess that means I’ll have to dust myself off and study harder the next time I retake the test (from what I understand most classes allow you to try again if you fail the final the first time).

Why, you ask? Why do I want to eat a ten pound bag of Oreos on top of about a quart of Ben n Jerry’s Chubby Hubby?

Well, there are several reasons.

The dreams have started again.  Seems I typically only remember my dreams (or have dreams worth remembering) during times of extreme stress.  They dissapeared a few months ago but this morning I had a real fun one where CB took me to register for a new class and the professor wouldn’t let me take the course until I could read out loud for him in front of the whole class.  Only he spoke in gibberish.  Not the gibberish I’ve come to associate with extrememly elderly people from West Flanders (heh, Flemish people probably get that joke…see how well I’m integrating?), but actual total gibberish.  Then he handed me a very think text book and it was in English.  Only I thought he said I had to be able to read in Dutch for the class.  So I looked at the English text and asked CB if I was supposed to read this in Dutch or in English and he just looked at me as if to say “What’s the matter with you, this is obvious, why don’t you know what to do?” And a whole class full of snotty little 22 year olds are staring at me and chatting away in Dutch and the professor is ignoring me and CB is looking at me like I’m the biggest dissapointment in the world all because I can’t turn English into Dutch.

Symbolic much?

That could explain why I’ve procrastinated the past 12 days when I should have logged onto the testsite for my Developmental Disorders class and gotten my electronic case study out of the way.  I was really worried that I totally wouldn’t get what was going on.  But the deadline was midnight on December 11 and despite the fact that I do procrastinate I’m not foolhardy enough to procrastinate that long when I’m not confident in my abilities, so today around 4 pm I started the case study*. The professor told us in class that it would take about 3 hours to finish the case.  He even gave us an example in class that neatly listed a bunch of demographic info and symptoms as well as a video of the child the study revolved around.  The video I found almost impossible to understand linguistically but dude, if a kid has Tourette’s a film is pretty obvious so I figured the case study would take 3 hours if and only if I was rediculously thorough.

So yeah, I started at about 4 pm this evening and I finished around 10:30.  Yes, that’s right, 10:30.  Granted I took an hour off for dinner so it took me five and a half hours, not six and a half.  This case study was a hell of a lot more in depth than the example in class and in all honesty, I didn’t quite latch on to where it was going till about halfway through.  So the first half did not look so good.  Once I realized how it was progressing though, I was able to narrow down the scope of my thinking and I think for the most part the rest of my answers were pretty close to what was required.

Oh and there was that whole “the damn thing’s in Dutch” part that, while expected, was much more difficult to pick through and translate than I’d thought.  I guess that’s because class is usually taught via slides so I can focus on keywords and use them in context.  This was paragraph after paragraph of psychobabble in Dutch.  One section that focused on the ADI-R was only 12 questions long but took me an hour to get through because I had to type every other word into my computerized Van-Dale dictionary just to know what the kid’s symptoms actually were.

Suffice it to say that my brain is pretty whupped.  Like, wimpering puppy with a tale between it’s legs sitting out in a puddle in the rain whupped.

Oh and for anyone curious about my cloistering comment, here’s a quick explanation:

CB has been working on his doctorate for quite some time.  He’s in the final stages of writing articles and resubmitting edited articles but things aren’t really moving at the desired pace.  He wants to be defending his thesis this spring, preferably before our trip to Pittsburgh in April.  In order to do so he will be spending one week this month and two weeks next month staying in a monastery in Leuven, the city his promoter lives in.  This is apparently a good solid way of getting meeting time in with his promoter (which hasn’t been happening as regularly as it was supposed to) as well as eliminating distractions so that he can focus on finishing his work.

I will not share my opinion of this plan because it will make me very unpopular amongst any supporters of it.

*FYI-this was only after I stayed in bed a good portion of the day and read the remaining 75% of Dead Before Dark…after that dream I desperately wanted nothing more than to read and enjoy the english language